A recent press release reports, “The OpenStack community today released Pike, the 16th version of the most widely deployed open source infrastructure software, with a focus on manageability, composability and scale. The software now powers 60 public cloud availability zones and more than a thousand private clouds running across more than five million physical cores. With new delivery models like private-cloud-as-a-service, it’s easier than ever to adopt OpenStack through the open source ecosystem where users are not locked into a proprietary technology or single vendor. OpenStack’s modular architecture also allows you to pick the functionality you need—whether that’s bare metal or block storage provisioning—to plug into your infrastructure stack. This composability—which makes possible use cases like edge computing and NFV—is a marked distinction from proprietary on-premises offerings, or even earlier versions of OpenStack.”

The release goes on, “Community trends and statistics: Composable services are gaining ground to address new use cases like containers, machine learning and edge computing. For example, OpenStack Ironic bare metal service now features enhanced integration for Cinder block storage and Neutron networking, and Cinder can now act as a standalone storage service for virtual machines, bare metal, or containers using Docker or Kubernetes. Significant development efforts have gone into lifecycle management tools including OpenStack Kolla, which makes it easier to manage and upgrade OpenStack using services like Kubernetes and Ansible. Kolla saw an 19 percent increase in contributors in the Pike release as compared to the Ocata release. More OpenStack users are adopting a multi-cloud strategy and placing workloads across public and private cloud environments based on cost, compliance and capabilities. According to the April 2017 user survey, vendor lock-in was the number one business driver for OpenStack clouds, and 38 percent of OpenStack deployments interact with at least one other public or private cloud environment.”